All posts in policy

On March 3, The Center’s Environmental History and Policy program organized “TSCA: From Inception to Reform, a Public Dialogue” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. The event brought together five participants who helped shape the Toxic Substances Control Act to discuss their successes and failures.

Fostering increased innovation in the U.S. as a general principle is hard to oppose and I’m sure we’ll see a government-sponsored program to fund and encourage a wide range of innovations. But to do something big and inspiring with near-term impact you have to concentrate your efforts. Here's why I think green energy should be the cause we rally around.

This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in chemistry. But a recent flurry of articles about the glut of Ph.D. chemists has me thinking about Curie’s Ph.D. thesis.

In January 2011, I conducted an interview with James Von Ehr II, arguably the entrepreneur who has invested the most of his personal resources in nanotechnology, as part of the partnership between the Center for Contemporary History and Policy and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

It’s a new year, a new Congress, and possibly a new opportunity for reform of TSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act. As part of CHF’s TSCA Oral History Project, on March 3rd CHF will be bringing the stories we’ve gathered to stage as “TSCA: From Inception to Reform, A Public Dialogue.”

Members of the Center for Contemporary History and Policy often write about energy and other environmental science issues. I want to draw your attention to last week's post by Ron Reynolds, Mission Accepted: Clean Energy, as Ron plans to write follow-ups throughout this International Year of Chemistry. Additionally, I want to highlight some of our previous posts on the subject.

Last week’s post was from the global kickoff of the International Year of Chemistry in Paris. This week marks the U.S. launch, a collaboration of the American Chemical Society, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Chemistry Council, National Academy of Sciences, and CHF.

This morning, the Academy named Gasland, Josh Fox's documentary about the controversy surrounding natural gas drilling in the Appalachian Mountains, as an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary. Like Fox, we've been trying to make sense of the environmental toll this practice is taking on our neighbors.